


Choosing Your Pain

by pencilguin



Series: Things We Didn't See [1]
Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 09:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14445888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pencilguin/pseuds/pencilguin
Summary: Missing scenes from Episode 1x05, focusing on Paul Stamets.





	Choosing Your Pain

**Author's Note:**

> Mild content warning for injury to a human and a non-humanoid being. What happened in the episode, basically.

The sound of the front door opening made Paul look up from his PADD, watching Hugh step into their shared quarters with an exhausted sigh before he bent down to take off his boots and unzip his uniform jacket. As his eyes landed on Paul a familiar, warm smile spread across his face.

“Hi honey. You’re home early.”

Paul returned his smile in kind. “Work’s been going well lately. We’re finally making progress. So I thought I’d get some reading done while waiting for you to get back.” Paul was already in his pajamas, covered under his blanket as he was sitting on their bed. Hugh’s shift was supposed to have ended two hours ago. Of course this was nothing unusual, medical emergencies always took precedence over shift schedules, and Hugh had a loose definition of “medical emergency” anyway—one of the many things Paul loved about him. Paul, on the other hand, rarely had such a noble excuse for working late, so he tried to make up for it whenever he got the chance to, like today. “Long day?”

“Yeah, but nothing dramatic.” Hugh continued talking as he walked over into the bathroom. “Just a lot of small things.”

“So, what are you reading?”

Hugh had returned from the bathroom in his Starfleet pajamas, climbed into the bed, and made himself comfortable with his head resting on Paul’s lap. He was now smiling up at Paul with a relaxed, but tired, expression.

“Just reading up on a few studies and publications about tardigrades.”

“Oh,” Hugh responded, and when Paul looked at him he saw the hint of a frown appearing between his brows. “Did you know Michael Burnham came to me today about Ripper?”

“She did?” Now it was Paul’s turn to frown. “Why?”

“She was worried about the changes in its behavior over the last few days. The jumps seem to cause it a great deal of pain, and its recovery has been slower and less successful with every jump.”

Paul stared at him in shock. This was the first he’d heard of it. Had he really been so caught up in the relief and the excitement of the spore drive finally working that he had missed these signs? Of course, Ripper always roared loudly when the spore chamber activated, but Paul was far from being an expert at discerning tardigrade cries. And he collapsed in the chamber because navigating the jumps was exhausting … right? The room suddenly felt too cold. Paul never had intended to hurt anyone. He couldn’t imagine Straal intentionally hurting anyone with his contraption either, especially since they probably had found Ripper frolicking about peacefully in the spore storage bay on the Glenn.

“What did you do?” he finally asked Hugh.

“I started to run some tests. Gathered the data we already had from previous scans. The computer’s still processing everything, but it should be done some time around noon tomorrow.”

Paul swallowed, trying to calm himself with the thought that there wasn’t much anyone could do until then. At least there were no jumps scheduled for the next 48 hours, but it was wartime, as Lorca never failed to remind them, and you never knew what might happen in a few hours or in the next fifteen minutes.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Hugh stayed silent for a moment, thinking. “I can’t say much yet. We’ll know more tomorrow, and hopefully figure out a way for it to get better.”

“I hope so, too,” Paul said pensively. He remembered the way Ripper had rolled around blissfully between his _Prototaxites_ and chased after the glowing spores. How he had snuck past the hull of the Glenn traveling through the network in search for the mushrooms. “They are fascinating creatures, you know, tardigrades. Did you know they can survive in the vacuum of space, both extremely high and extremely low pressure and temperatures, radiation, dehydration, starvation, and without oxygen? Not to mention Ripper’s impenetrable skin that didn’t even get a scratch from half a dozen Klingon soldiers attacking him.” His expression turned into a sad smile. “I thought he was invulnerable.”

Hugh stroked his arm comfortingly. “It’s an easy mistake to make. Creatures with the hardest shells are often the most vulnerable inside. You of all people should know that,” he added, and the fond glow that lit up his face wasn’t lost on Paul.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

With a sigh, he turned off his PADD and placed it on his bedside table.

“Let’s hope for some good news tomorrow.”

 

As Paul’s mind had wandered, once again, to Ripper and the conversation with Hugh from the previous night, he had also found himself wandering into the Discovery’s main cultivation bay again. Before opening the door to the bay, he pondered for a moment, but ultimately decided against taking a phaser with him this time. He had never needed it before, and, given the status quo, was unlikely to need it today. He opened the door and entered his forest of _Prototaxites stellaviatori_.

The forest lay quiet and calm before him as usual. Luminescent spores silently floated through the air, sauntering lazily between the branches of the fungi, while the faint humming of the cultivators and the ship’s operations encased the room. Paul breathed deeply for a few heartbeats, taking in the familiar, relaxing atmosphere. Then he reached for his communicator.

“Energize.”

Ripper materialized in the aisle between the mushrooms ahead of the entrance, a few meters in front of Paul. After a brief moment of confusion on the tardigrade’s part, he quickly started jumping around happily, his antennae gently making contact with the trunks of the mushrooms as he seemed to sniff around for spores, and excitedly leaping after them when his shuffling swirled up a cloud of the glowing particles all around his head.

Paul leaned down to rest his elbows on the railing; a smile curled around his lips while his eyes followed Ripper, who was now starting to roll around between the mushroom trunks. Any other creature squashing his babies like that would have immediately given Paul a conniption, but it was a small price to pay for the positive effects that he found the tardigrade to have on his crop. Burnham had been right, this was a true symbiotic relationship. Every time he had repeated these little experiments, the mushrooms had flourished after their contact with Ripper. Seeing them interact was heartwarming. “What are you guys talking about?” Paul would mutter while watching. What wouldn’t he give up to be able to listen in on their conversations, to experience the flow of—oh, of energy, of quantum information, of whatever it was that connected them—between the creature and the fungus. He might be getting a little too esoteric there, but it seemed like they were sharing the greatest and oldest secrets of the universe, and Paul was feeling painfully left out.

But today, his brows were furrowed. There was no denying that Ripper was different. His movements were slower, his little hops smaller and less frequent, and his roars were quieter than usual. Paul hoped that this, here, would make him feel better—some rest among his beloved spores, a change of scenery from his usual containment pen in warmonger Lorca’s creepy, dim office. He should inform Lorca that the tardigrade and the spore drive had limitations, and that they should try to keep the frequency of their jumps to a minimum, at least until they could figure out another solution for navigating the network. Whenever that would be. So far, despite great efforts on Paul and his team’s part, they had not been successful at creating a program or an AI that was able to interact with the network, process the massive amounts of data necessary to map all possible end points, and reliably calculate the best path to get there. Paul couldn’t help the suspicion that it wasn’t only the lack of a supercomputer, as Lorca had speculated, but more importantly, their frustrating inability to fully grasp how the mycelial network operated. All the best theories were useless if you were unable to verify them; and like this, all he could do was look for correlations between estimated and actual outcome and hope that they hadn’t just been a fluke. Not a good basis for safe and reliable space travel.

After watching Ripper for a few more minutes with a sad smile, Paul sighed, straightening up and stretching.

“Alright buddy, let’s get you back into your box,” he said with a clear voice in Ripper’s direction, “before you destroy the rest of strand kappa-27.” Ripper looked up lazily and gave a mournful groan as if he understood what Paul was saying.

 

“ _Black alert. Black alert._ ”

The computer’s voice sounded loud and clear through the room. The uneasy feeling that had started to unravel earlier as Paul had unloaded the spore container into the drive settled down heavily in his gut as he watched Ripper materialize inside the spore chamber. He struggled, lashed out—of course he knew what was coming. As the needles activated and once again pierced the extraordinarily robust tardigrade skin with ease, Paul finally knew without a doubt that Burnham—and Hugh—had been right: Something was wrong, terribly wrong. Ripper screamed out in pain, writhing and struggling against the needles that were holding him in place, the skin around the puncture wounds glowing in an angry red. Suddenly, Paul felt very sick. Had it been this bad every time? How could he not have seen what his and Straal’s invention had been doing to this innocent creature? He was a scientist, he studied and valued life in all its countless forms. This was exactly what he had feared when he joined Starfleet, this was what war made people do, this was what _Starfleet_ did, and now he was part of it, and he felt disgusted with himself. He wanted to avert his eyes, but forced himself to keep them fixed on the chamber.

The familiar sensation of water condensing in the air around them came and passed, and the jump was over. Paul sensed that Tilly was holding her breath, just like he was, and they watched in suspense as the needles retreated. With a last, pained groan Ripper crashed to the ground in the spore chamber.

Paul reacted on instinct; before he realized what he was doing he had rushed toward the door and opened it. A second later, Tilly was by his side. Ripper had curled up into a fetal position, his body was shrinking down rapidly as it ejected nearly all the water it had been holding through his skin, until he had become nothing more than a deformed gray ball, lying motionless in a puddle on the floor.

“Cadet,” Paul said, trying to keep his voice from breaking but failing, “contact medical immediately. Have them send Doctor Culber, he’s still on shift.”

“Y-yes, of course,” Tilly responded with a tremble in her voice and hurried out of the chamber.

Paul crouched down next to the tardigrade, trying to make out any life signs coming from the gray lump in front of him. The hard shell he had formed was still glistening with moisture in the cold, blue-white light coming from above. Paul slowly reached out a hand, but then stopped and withdrew it, not daring to touch the creature after what he had done to it. With a last, pain-filled look at Ripper and a deep crease between his eyebrows, he got up.

“Engineering to bridge, this is Lieutenant Stamets. Commander, we are having a problem with the tardigrade.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line before Saru spoke.

“What happened, Lieutenant?”

“Sir, I’m afraid we don’t know for sure yet. The tardigrade has curled up and is non-responsive. We—” Paul hesitated for a moment before he continued, “We are not sure if it’s still alive or not.”

“Get medical down there immediately,” Saru commanded.

Paul shot a glance at Tilly, who gave a small nod.

“They have been informed, and are on their way.”

“Very well,” Saru said. “I want an immediate report as soon as you have any new information.”

“Understood, sir.”

The comm fell silent. Paul closed his eyes and took a deep breath as a stinging headache formed behind his eyes.

 

It only took a few minutes of waiting in heavy silence until the doors slid open and Hugh rushed inside.

He and Paul shared a brief, silent look, and Paul tried to convey as much of his guilt in it as he could without compromising his professionalism entirely. He stepped aside so Hugh could enter the spore chamber, where he knelt down next to Ripper’s cocooned body and started to unpack his tricorder and medical equipment, then proceeded to examine him carefully with gentle hands and concerned looks. “Tell me what happened,” he ordered quietly without looking up at the rest of the room.

As Paul recounted the events of the last jump through a calm façade, Hugh picked up various instruments that he started treating Ripper with. He didn’t talk much, and when he did, it was the same quiet, clinical voice as his first question, but Paul could tell. It was a dangerous, angry kind of calm.

“I can’t help,” Hugh finally said with a sigh, and stowed away his instruments before standing up. “It has gone into cryptobiosis, a state of forced hibernation due to extreme stress. There is nothing we can do to reanimate it without harming it even further.”

“But is—” Paul surprised himself with how small his voice sounded. “Is it still alive?”

“Barely, yes.”

“And …” He caught himself glancing over at Tilly, whose expression was as helpless and terrified as he felt. “Is it still in pain?”

Hugh looked at him for a long moment, his face unreadable, before he responded.

“I really couldn’t tell you, Lieutenant.”

Paul lowered his head and let out an exhausted breath, vaguely aware of Tilly’s eyes darting back and forth between him and Hugh with her usual excess nervous energy. “Let’s go, Doctor,” he said, moving towards the door, “the commander is waiting for our report.”

Hugh followed him through the door without another word, only giving a polite nod to Tilly as he passed her. They walked down the hallway towards the turbolift in tense silence that weighed heavier on Paul with each passing second. After the lift doors had closed behind them, Hugh spoke.

“I should have known better than to expect that you ever listen to me, but I thought Michael Burnham and I had made it clear that your invention is causing actual physical harm to a living being.”

Paul winced at the coldness in his voice. “Hugh, I …” He stared at his partner pleadingly, “I never wanted this to happen.”

“But you did.”

“We tried to find a solution! We were starting to figure out a way to make the spore drive work without a tardigrade.”

Paul noticed his own voice getting louder against his will with every word that spilled out.

“But we need more time!”

He didn’t want to yell at Hugh.

“Saru walked in and told us off.”

Why was he yelling?

“Said he needed the spore drive working _right now_ to rescue the captain.”

Hugh was right.

“He sent Burnham to her quarters because she stood up to him and then told the rest of us to get back to work.”

Saru had to be under a lot of pressure right now that he most likely wasn’t accustomed to.

“I had my orders! I—oh, fuck it.”

“Hey,” Hugh said sternly, “language.”

“Oh, don’t start,” Paul snapped back.

As quickly as it had sparked up, his anger was deflating. The truth was, he had never been one to obey orders that he didn’t agree with. He despised the military culture of institutions like Starfleet, where people hid behind the chain of command to avoid any moral responsibility. This was his fault, and his alone, and Ripper’s blood was on his hands as well as Saru’s.

He turned away, not daring to look at Hugh, whose eyes were still piercing right through his heart with their intensity. With his head lowered and his voice quiet he said, “I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this now.”

Before Hugh could respond, the turbolift doors opened.

 

Paul’s mind was racing as he strode across the corridors of the Discovery, mostly in a constant stream of profanities directed at Starfleet for drafting him, at Saru for his inane orders, at Lorca for getting kidnapped by Klingons, and, not least, at himself. The look on Hugh’s face as Paul had rushed out of the room and left the dear doctor standing there alone continued to haunt him. His ears were filled with the deafening sound of his own blood rushing through his head. Did Hugh try to run after him? Shout at him? Paul wouldn’t have known. He didn’t have time to deal with Hugh right now, couldn’t deal right now, with the accusation in Hugh’s eyes that was melting away his shell.

Before he realized it, his body had autopiloted him back to the door to his engineering lab, where he finally hesitated. Out here in the hallway he was moving, going somewhere, he had a destination. Once he walked in, he wouldn’t know what to do. After a deep breath to steel himself, he entered.

As the doors opened, all eyes immediately fell on Paul. He just managed not to flinch from all the sudden, silently expectant attention and looked around the room. There was Tilly, looking almost as lost and scared as he had left her, though not shivering quite as much. When his eyes settled on the spore chamber, he realized that Ripper was still inside, lying motionless on the damp floor in his state of cryptobiosis, as Hugh had called it. No one else had dared to touch him it seemed. Paul had to force himself to pull his eyes away from Ripper’s curled up form and slowly walked to his station, trying hard to ignore the stares of his team following his every move, obviously waiting for him to speak.

His mind kept going in circles, yet was unable to settle on a single coherent thought. After a few more silent moments, Tilly appeared at his side and spoke, tentatively and quietly.

“Sir? What—um, what do we do now?”

Paul stared at her for a moment while he gathered his thoughts, before speaking as calmly and factually as he could, addressing the whole room.

“Commander Saru ordered that we reanimate the tardigrade and bring the spore drive back online as fast as possible, so we can jump out of Klingon space as soon as we have retrieved Captain Lorca.”

Murmurs erupted around him instantly and Paul could feel his headache getting worse. Tilly stared at him in shocked silence, clearly distressed and uncomfortable.

“B-but Doctor Culber said—”

“I know, Cadet.”

“I thought we were trying to find a solution that didn’t have to rely on—”

“I know, Cadet.”

“Sir, we—we can’t do this, this isn’t right, Ripper is going to die, we can’t do something like—”

“I _know_ , Cadet,” Paul involuntarily snapped at her, “believe me, I am fully aware of the moral dilemma of this situation. I am also aware that I received a very clear order from Commander Saru, and that we are still in the middle of a rescue mission for Captain Lorca, and that we are currently stranded in enemy territory with no means of getting out of here unharmed, and that it is my responsibility to find a solution for this, and if you have any idea that might be of help, Cadet, then right now would be a good time to hear it.”

Tilly’s lip trembled while she stared at him like a deer in the headlights. She stayed silent. No-one else in the room spoke, either.

Paul turned away from her, back to his station. He tried not to think about how guilty he felt for snapping at her like that. None of this was her fault. But he needed to think, and the mere presence of everyone else in this room was too distracting right now.

He remembered a concerned Hugh telling him what he and Burnham had found out about Ripper’s condition. Burnham’s conflicted expression when Saru scolded her and sent her off to her quarters. Hugh telling him that his prediction had been correct and that they had strained Ripper too much, and that there was nothing he could do to get him to recover without killing him. Saru, with the weight of a responsibility he’d never had to carry before in his voice, ordering him to do anything that was necessary to save their captain. Hugh refusing to let an innocent creature die. Tilly’s terrified face while she looked to him for answers, asking what to do to fix this. Hugh saying that the tardigrade may be sentient. Was sentient. The look on Hugh’s face as he watched Paul accept his new orders from Saru. Oh god, that look. Paul lowered his head and closed his eyes. Hugh’s face as he watched Paul’s betrayal remained, burnt into his retinas.

“Sir?”

Paul looked up at Tilly again, who appeared to be on the verge of tears now, and with panic in her voice. She looked like Paul felt. Of course, his behavior must have scared her. She didn’t even dare to blabber on like a waterfall as she usually did when she was nervous—which, yes, could be exhausting at times, but it was also a breath of fresh air in this serious and gloomy wartime Starfleet lab. Paul wouldn’t say it out loud, but _god_ , he adored her. Which made it even harder to drag her into this, or anyone else on this team. The responsibility for whatever had to be done was his to bear, and his alone. But there was no simple solution, no easy way out, and they were running out of time.

“Leave.”

Tilly blinked at him.

“What?”

“Get out of here, Cadet Tilly.”

“But—”

“Out!” Paul shouted, “All of you! Your breathing’s too loud, I can’t concentrate with all of you people in the room.”

One of the ensigns hesitantly made a step forward.

“Sir, are you really sure we should—”

“I need to think! Go!”

Paul leaned onto the console, staring into the distance, as everyone else left the room one by one. Without looking he was vaguely aware that, with an uncertain glance back at him, Tilly was the last one to leave. He didn’t have time to feel sorry. His mind was racing, gearing up to find a solution now that all external distractions had left.

He couldn’t kill the tardigrade. He would never forgive himself if he did, and neither would Hugh. As if there had ever been any doubt about that—but of course, Hugh had to also give him _that look_. Paul had never actually considered the option, regardless of what he had said to Saru on the bridge. Simply refusing his order would just get them all killed deep within Klingon territory, both Lorca and every single one of the 133 people on this ship. But a magical third option just wouldn’t appear, no matter how fast he was trying to will his oh-so-“brilliant” mind to work.

At least not without disobeying another direct order. His gaze wandered over to the table, where the hypospray bottle full of tardigrade DNA compound was still lying, just as Burnham had left it.

He prepared the spore drive. Inserted the spore container, typed the next course into the computer (to their last safe location), booted up the jump protocol. Then he walked over to the table with the little hypospray injector, looked at it, thinking.

All those years, wondering and guessing about the intricate inner workings of the mycelial network of _Prototaxites stellaviatori_. All those months, trying and failing to grasp the essence of what made it _be_ , what it _meant_ , what it _did_ , of all the _what_ , the _why_ , and the _how_. All those hours of losing himself in thoughts envying Ripper for his connection with the mushrooms, his insights into their universe; this amazing, ridiculous creature to whom all these things which Paul had longed for nearly all his life came so easily. To say that the idea of combining this creature’s DNA with his own, if it meant access to all the potential secrets of the network, hadn’t been beyond exciting would have been a blatant lie. He never said it out loud, of course, but as soon as they had come up with that theory, a part of him couldn’t wait to dive straight in, all potential consequences be damned.

Paul knew full well, of course, why eugenics were banned, and that, as Saru had reminded them, this was exactly what he was about to do. If he _did_ survive it, he might end up becoming Michael Burnham’s cellmate as soon as the war was over, if not earlier. Well, he thought, there were worse people to be locked up for the rest of your life with. At least Michael was smart. Paul wondered if Hugh would be allowed to visit him in prison.

He thought of Hugh, and what would happen to him if this insane plan failed.

He thought of what would happen to Hugh if he didn’t try it at all.

He grabbed the hypospray.

With a firm grip on the injector, Paul walked over to his station and brought the spore drive back online. Then he made his way over to the spore chamber, where Ripper was still lying on the ground, unaware of Paul’s inner turmoil and completely unfazed by everything that had happened around him since he had curled up.

Paul knelt down in front of Ripper again, regarding him for a moment with pain in his eyes, and whispered: “Sorry I let you down, buddy.” Then he ordered the computer to transport Ripper back to his containment pen. With the chamber now empty, and the whole room completely deserted except for him, Paul stood up and walked into the cell.

He tried to swallow down the surge of panic in his chest as he looked at the needles on Straal’s apparatus and remembered them piercing through Ripper’s seemingly impenetrable skin with ease. Up this close, they looked much longer and bigger than he remembered them. Paul had always hated needles.

His stomach gave an unpleasant jolt as the bridge comm channel opened and Saru’s voice filled the room.

“Lieutenant Stamets, have you revived the tardigrade?”

Paul worded his response carefully.

“We are able to jump, Commander.”

The comm channel closed.

“Computer, ready to activate spore drive and initiate the jump sequence.”

“ _Ready to jump. On stand-by, awaiting black alert,_ ” the computer voice responded.

Paul took a deep breath, steeled himself, then raised the hypospray to his neck and injected it.

“ _Black alert. Black alert._ ”

With a buzz, the chamber activated and Straal’s contraption sprang to life. For a second or two, while the spores were floating innocently in the air around him, Paul tried to imagine the surprise and confusion on the faces of his team outside. He was actually relieved that working on the compound with Burnham and Tilly had made him skip lunch today because he’d most likely be throwing up right now otherwise. Then all further thoughts were wiped from his mind as the needles stabbed him on either side, and he dropped the hypospray, screaming in pain.

The Discovery jumped, and it was beyond anything the human language could describe, or the human mind could comprehend.

 

As the needles finally retreated and no longer held Paul Stamets’ body in place, he dropped to his knees, sweating, breathing heavily, head spinning, and then fell down and passed out on the floor.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time publishing anything in English. Many thanks to 30MinuteLoop for beta reading!  
> (Bonus: [commentary](https://deluminate.tumblr.com/post/175380939282))


End file.
